Original Post
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Mar 24, 2011 • 10:49 Profile Photo VirtualChris

Since I made an Ants for the Atari 2600 and I’m busy with Ants for the Odyssey^2, I thought to myself, why not make an Ants for the Virtual Boy? So, here’s the beginning. It wasn’t really a very fun game to begin with, more like a programming exercise, but I’d like to make a version of it for every system I know how to make homebrew games on. Since I know a little on how to do the Virtual Boy, I thought I’d do this. Note that this is a beginning, not the final product, and I hope to have stuff like walls and a timer (and if there’s a timer, there should be lives, too) before I finish it. The premise is simple: Touch the ants. To start a game, press A. I know this game doesn’t have to be 512k, so if someone can please tell me how to make the game smaller in size, I forgot how to do that.

Attachments:
  1. an.vb
10 Replies
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Mar 24, 2011 • 18:53 Profile Photo RunnerPack

VirtualChris wrote:
I know this game doesn’t have to be 512k, so if someone can please tell me how to make the game smaller in size, I forgot how to do that.

http://www.planetvb.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=297

But just zipping the ROM would at least shrink the download quite a bit. 7-zip has excellent context menu support to make this super fast.

I don’t have time to try Ants now, but I’m glad you continue to polish your VB (and other console) dev skills! :thumpup:

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Mar 24, 2011 • 19:22 Profile Photo VirtualChris

I’ve run into a little problem: If you get above 99 ants, the counter goes crazy. Is there any way to stop this?

Attachments:
  1. ants.zip
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Mar 24, 2011 • 20:36 Profile Photo HorvatM

You can use the PrintStr function from Soviet Union 2010 to print numbers over 99.

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Mar 24, 2011 • 21:06 Profile Photo RunnerPack

I use dasi’s posprintf() port. It wouldn’t be hard to cludge another digit into your existing cludge, though…

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char ants_str[4]; // Should probably be initialized
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// TODO: put some range checking here
ants_str[0]=(antc/100)+'0';
ants_str[1]=(antc/10)+'0';
ants_str[2]=(antc%10)+'0';
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  • This reply was modified 13 years, 8 months ago by RunnerPack.
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Mar 24, 2011 • 21:32 Profile Photo VirtualChris

As with both suggestions, I keep getting an error message that says the following:
“passing arg # of ‘posprintf’ makes pointer from integer without a cast.”
Replace the # with a number from 1-3 and you get my error messages.

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Mar 24, 2011 • 21:36 Profile Photo RunnerPack

You don’t pass the number as the string to be printed, you pass a “formatting string” and the number as an argument.

posprintf(ants_str, "%d", antc);

Or, to limit it to three digits:

posprintf(ants_str, "%03d", antc);

Just search for a printf tutorial.

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Mar 24, 2011 • 21:41 Profile Photo VirtualChris

OK, I tried what you did on the edited post, and I got a number that said 1A0 when it got to 110.

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Mar 24, 2011 • 21:42 Profile Photo HorvatM

RunnerPack wrote:

ants_str[0]=(antc/100)+'0';
ants_str[1]=(antc/10)+'0';
ants_str[2]=(antc%10)+'0';

This wouldn’t work. What if ‘antc’ is, for example, 110? Then ‘antc/10’ would be 11.

EDIT: VirtualChris already caught it.

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Mar 24, 2011 • 22:44 Profile Photo RunnerPack

It was just a quick example to point in the right direction. I think printf is the way to go, but here’s the right cludge, for posterity:

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char ants_str[4]; // Should probably be initialized
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// TODO: put some range checking here
ants_str[0]=(antc/100)+'0';
ants_str[1]=((antc%100)/10)+'0';
ants_str[2]=((antc%100)%10)+'0';
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Mar 25, 2011 • 03:00 Profile Photo VirtualChris

Now with SFX!

Attachments:
  1. antssfx.zip

 

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